Food Industry News, Insights, and Education for the CPG Community

In a webinar last week, market research group SPINS shared its 2018 food and beverage trend predictions, which included a rise in new speciality ingredients, an evolution of consumers’ diet preferences and a greater emphasis placed on packaging.

In this week of The Checkout, retail competitors try to find new ways to cater to their customers’ needs and a “nutty” acquisition.

Following the closure of cold pressed juice company Juice Served Here, co-founder and former CEO Alex Matthews now tasked with the job of evolving the visual identity for Forager Project as the plant-based food and beverage brand’s new chief marketing officer.

This week, two up and coming natural food brands — chilled bar brand Perfect Bar and baking mix company Foodstirs — announced they are launching at Starbucks cafes nationwide. The retail addition is just one piece of each brands’ marketing strategy for product innovation and capturing new consumers.

Seafood brand Safe Catch hopes to bring millennials back to the canned seafood category and investors believe they can. Yesterday the brand announced a $5 million raise.

Watch as Stonewall Kitchen CEO John Stiker spoke with the NOSH team about how he’s looking to further build out Stonewall’s gourmet food empire by diversifying. The hope is to create a platform of numerous specialty brands across all categories.

To make sense of the FDA’s recent flood of guidances and announcements, we spoke with a few industry experts to help us break down the regulatory and political jargon and explain what it could potentially mean for business leaders.

Is Josh Tetrick the Steve Jobs of food? Inside his JUST mission to revolutionize the food system; Fora Foods looks to disrupt the dairy space, beginning with its innovative vegan butter.

Popped snack brand PopCorners has reverted to an earlier brand strategy, tossing aside last year’s pivot to a brand hierarchy governed by the name “Our Little Rebellion.” The new look returns to an emphasis on the PopCorners brand.

On quarterly earnings calls last week, global brands The Hershey Company and Mondelez Inc. spoke to how they plan to reinvigorate their portfolios by growing their salty snack lines.

Whether you’re planning to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, the halftime show or the snacks, there’s no arguing that the big game is a big opportunity for food and beverage companies to generate both revenue and brand awareness. Here’s how some brands and categories are hoping to score a touchdown this weekend.

What trends are brands embracing to stand out in a sea of food at a time when consumer expectations are already set so high? The Project NOSH team scoured the showroom floor to find out.

From flavor-blasted fusions to pre-cut-bars, the goal is to capture some of the dollars that are going into traditional snack categories like chips, crackers and salty snacks.

It’s a bean-anza as two CPG veterans joined legume-forward brands and a Francophile brand hired a new leader to accelerate the growth of its sweet snack line in the US.